In this introductory volume, readers will learn about the vital role that the various Critical Infrastructure (CI) sectors play in America, in the context of homeland security. The protection, maintenance, and monitoring of these interdependent CI assets is a shared responsibility of governments, private sector owner/operators, first responders, and all those involved in homeland security and emergency management. As this foundational learning resource demonstrates, rapidly advancing technologies combined with exponential growth in demand on the aging infrastructure of America’s power grid is setting the stage for a potentially catastrophic collapse that would paralyze each and every facet of civilian life and military operations. This meticulously researched primer will guide readers through the known world of power failures and cyber-attacks to the emerging threat from a High-altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). A HEMP would cause cascading failures in the power grid, communications, water treatment facilities, oil refineries, pipelines, banking, supply chain management, food production, air traffic control, and all forms of transportation. Each chapter in America’s Greatest Existential Threat (Vol. 1) begins with learning objectives and ends with a series of review questions to assess take-up of the chapter material. Similarly, subsequent volumes will explore HEMP and emerging issues in closer detail with current research and analysis now in development.

In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination.

What is America? Is it a hegemonic superpower, composed of ruthlessly selfish capitalists? Or is it a land of hope and glory, a shelter for the huddled masses, and a beacon of freedom and enlightenment? The definition of this complex nation has been debated substantially, yet all seem to agree on one thing: it is unique. The idea of an exceptional America can be traced all the way back to Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century observations of a newly formed democracy that seemed determined to distinguish itself from the rest. Little, it seems, has changed. Building on de Tocqueville's concept of American exceptionalism, this collection of essays, contributed by some of the nation's top scholars and thinkers, takes on the weighty task of sizing up America in a way its people and others can comprehend. Far more than simple history, they outline the current state of American institutions and policies -- from the legal system to marriage to the military to the Drug War -- and anticipate where these are headed in the future.

For decades, the United States has underestimated the threat from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In doing so, it has left our country vulnerable to their devious plans—a profound, strategic miscalculation. As a result of this carelessness, the United States is at risk of losing its dominant position in global politics. But how did this happen? How was it possible that the US could lose its dominant position after its Cold War victory and allow the rise of a peer enemy over a short period of time—about thirty years? In Embracing Communist China, authors James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer get to the bottom of this heinous miscalculation. Broken down into three central arguments, Fanell and Thayer lay out not only the reason for China’s rise in power, but how the United States could have prevented it. Due to failures on the parts of the national security commission, strategists, military personnel, and the intelligence community, a historical case of “threat deflation” caused our country to refute all supplied information of China’s growing power. By not taking this seriously, the PRC has risen with the goal of usurping the US as a global superpower. US business interests and financiers trumped strategy. Seeing China as a source of cheap labor for manufacturing, investment, and intellectual labor—including for research and development—the mighty dollar’s influence reigned supreme, overlooking the big picture. With their advancements, China used its political warfare strategy to promote threat deflation under Deng Xiaoping. As such, the PRC—learning key lessons from the Soviet Union’s mistakes in the Cold War—focused on elites from all aspects of US and other Western societies, enriching them and shaping their perception of China and of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while using the enticement of a growing market to influence their behavior. As Americans, we can no longer think of China as a secondary power, but one that is looking to remove the US as the most powerful country in the world. By understanding the profound strategic failures made by the US are we are able to correct them and so defeat the PRC as the we did the Soviet Union.

This volume takes an unashamed pro-nuclear modernization position and argues for designing and fielding new nuclear warheads and delivery systems (submarine, ICBM, and bomber) while also arguing against signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty or agreeing to further reductions in the nuclear arsenal. It also argues that nuclear deterrence remains as relevant today, perhaps more, than it was during the Cold War.

Change is accelerating and the world of 2023 is unrecognizable from the world that existed just five years ago. In a very subtle and incremental manner, American society has been transformed from what once was the world's premiere super-power, a country that was exalted as an example of freedom, justice, morality, and liberty, into a divided group of many tribes, cultures, and political and special interest groups often lacking a moral compass. We go with the loudest tribe fitting our basic ideals or choose to go it alone. And when we try to avoid the many tribes of destruction, we often tend to adopt the idol of the god of self. Community and unity are being left to die a slow, painful death. America's true north has become obscured because we decided to forego God as the light for our path. This has allowed us to quickly forget the race worth running as well as those foundational values that once comprised what we stood for as a country. But how did we get here and how can the trend of moral decay and divisiveness be reversed? The Great American Backslide came about as a result of not just understanding that our natural tendency as humans is to be selfish and sinful, but knowing we are being given substantial assistance by the dominion of darkness. This book will take us through an analysis of biblical, secular, and non-secular explanations of the existence of evil; how it induces cultural paradigm shifts aimed to ultimately separate us from God; how evil leverages our emotions, our brain chemistry, and our sinful human nature to manipulate subtle and incremental compromises of truth; how evil sustains itself and creates ever-increasing moral decay leading to further evil through a cycle of depravity; and how we can go about living in opposition to evil influences upon our world.

This textbook examines non-traditional forms of security and expands the notion of security to include non-state actors and non-human actors. Proposing an expansive view of non-traditional forms of security that go beyond traditionally recognized issues of threats to state and national territory, this new textbook rests on the following premises: traditional state-centered threats, such as nuclear proliferation and espionage, remain a concern; old and new threats combine and create interlocking puzzles—a feature of wicked problems and wicked messes; because of the global erosion of borders, new developments of unconventional insecurity interact in ways that frustrate traditional conceptual definitions, conceptual maps, and national policies; unconventional security challenges which have traditionally been seen as "low politics" or "soft" issues are now being recognized as "hard security" challenges in the twenty-first century; many of the so-called "new" threats detailed here are in fact very old: diseases, gender violence, food insecurity, under-development, and crime are all traditional security threats, but deeply modified today by globalization. The chapters offer local and global examples and engage with various theoretical approaches to help readers see the bigger picture. Solutions are also suggested to these problems. Each chapter contains discussion questions to help readers understand the key points and facilitate class discussion. This book will be of great interest to students of international security studies, human security, global politics, and international relations.

This book explains the period of great power peace in the last fifty years and outlines the path to perpetuating it. Drawing on the Realist tradition and challenging conventional wisdom about the causes of American primacy, Baron explores contributions to peace made by the balance of power, nuclear weapons, democracy and globalization.

This urgent and eye-opening book makes the case that protecting humanity's future is the central challenge of our time. If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Our species could survive for billions of years - enough time to end disease, poverty, and injustice, and to flourish in ways unimaginable today. But this vast future is at risk. With the advent of nuclear weapons, humanity entered a new age, where we face existential catastrophes - those from which we could never come back. Since then, these dangers have only multiplied, from climate change to engineered pathogens and artificial intelligence. If we do not act fast to reach a place of safety, it will soon be too late. Drawing on over a decade of research, The Precipice explores the cutting-edge science behind the risks we face. It puts them in the context of the greater story of humanity: showing how ending these risks is among the most pressing moral issues of our time. And it points the way forward, to the actions and strategies that can safeguard humanity. An Oxford philosopher committed to putting ideas into action, Toby Ord has advised the US National Intelligence Council, the UK Prime Minister's Office, and the World Bank on the biggest questions facing humanity. In The Precipice, he offers a startling reassessment of human history, the future we are failing to protect, and the steps we must take to ensure that our generation is not the last. "A book that seems made for the present moment." —New Yorker

An urgent, historically-grounded take on the four major factors that undermine American democracy, and what we can do to address them. While many Americans despair of the current state of U.S. politics, most assume that our system of government and democracy itself are invulnerable to decay. Yet when we examine the past, we find that to the contrary, the United States has undergone repeated crises of democracy, from the earliest days of the republic to the present. In The Four Threats, Robert C. Lieberman and Suzanne Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power – alone or in combination – have threatened the survival of the republic, but it has survived, so far. What is unique, and alarming, about the present moment is that all four conditions are present in American politics today. This formidable convergence marks the contemporary era as an especially grave moment for democracy in the United States. But history provides a valuable repository from which contemporary Americans can draw lessons about how democracy was eventually strengthened — or in some cases weakened — in the past. By revisiting how earlier generations of Americans faced threats to the principles enshrined in the Constitution, we can see the promise and the peril that have led us to the present and chart a path toward repairing our civic fabric and renewing democracy.